As a conventional thermal image transfer technique there is a method comprising bringing a recording material having on a substrate a layer containing a heat fusible or heat sublimable dye in close contact with an image receiving material, and applying heat source from the recording material side by means of a thermal head or an electric head controlled by an electric signal to transfer an image to the image receiving material.
Thermal transfer recording has advantages such as no noise, maintenance-free, low cost, ease of color image formation and digital recording capability, and is applied in various fields such as printers, recorders, facsimile and computer terminals.
Technique of printers employing a thermal head has been markedly progressed. As a printing method giving high resolution image and enabling variable contrast recording with area contrast alone, there is proposed a sub-scanning separation method disclosed in Japanese Patent Publication Open to Pulic Inspection (hereinafter referred to as JP-A) Nos. 4-19163 and 5-155057 or a heat assembling method disclosed in "Denshishashin Gakkai Nenjitaikai Jun. 6, 1992 Yokoshu".
Recently, in the medical or printing fields requiring a high resolution image, there is proposed a dry recording method employing a high-power light source such as a laser. The example is disclosed in JP-A No. 59-143659.
An intermediate transfer material usable for a laser thermal transfer method is disclosed in JP-A No. 10-71775. In this embodiment, to prevent peeling static charge of a recording material, the surface specific resistance of a back coat is preferably to be not more than 2.times.10.sup.9.OMEGA.. However, in fact, with this surface specific resistance, it is impossible to sufficiently prevent static charge occuring in transportation in an apparatus, and it was found that electrostatic adsorption at teflon processed portion equipped at transportation guide to prevent abration marks occurs and causes transpotation trouble. The transpotation trouble that gives a damage to a laser image with high resolution power has an unpermitted problem for a practical use. Furthermore, in cases where a thermal transfer image forming material containing a light-heat converting layer is manufactured, coatability is occasionally a problem caused by the difference between property of the light-heat converting layer and that of other layer.